This research was designed to evaluate the interaction of conceptual and linguistic factors during the acquisition of the spatial and temporal systems of Polish, English and Finnish from 3 to 6 years of age. In the conceptual-spatial task, children reconstructed a layout from a 180-degree change in perspective, and in the conceptual-temporal task they arranged three picture cards in a sequence while telling a story. In the linguistic domain, there were two comprehension tests and one production test containing spatial and temporal contrasts requiring either a single or multiple referent object(s)/event(s). The main effects (i.e., age, dimension, complexity) were always significant. There was clear evidence for a Language x Dimension interaction in the linguistic
A B S T R A C TThe purpose of this research was to show how the syntactic and semantic components of the tense-aspect system interact during the acquisition process. Our methodology involved : (1) identifying predicates, (2) finding the initial occurrence of their tense-aspect morphology, and (3) observing the emergence of contrasts. Six children learning Polish and six children learning English, found in the CHILDES archives, were investigated. The average starting age of the children learning English was 1; 11, and 1 ; 8 for the children learning Polish. In the first analysis, we traced the same 12 verbs in both languages, and in the second analysis, we contrasted the acquisition patterns for a set of telic versus atelic predicates. We tracked the verbs/ predicates from the starting age to 4; 11 or the child's final transcript. In English, progressive aspect is the marked form, and in Polish, perfective aspect is the marked form. This typological distinction has a significant effect of the acquisition patterns in the two languages. We argue that children acquire a multi-dimensional system having deictic relations as one of the basic dimensions. This process can be best understood within a functional theoretical framework having a well-defined syntactic-semantic interface.
The purpose of this research was to investigate the manner in which reference time becomes integrated into the child's emerging systems of temporal reference. The longitudinal data from six children learning English and six children learning Polish were analyzed within the period from about 1;6 to 5;0. The temporal reference within an event time and a reference time system was evaluated. Regarding reference time constructions, we traced the acquisition of the following terms: (1) English, when, then, before, after, yesterday, today and tomorrow, and (2) Polish, potem ‘then’, jak (simultaneous ‘when’), jak (sequential, ‘after’), przed ‘before’, po ‘after’, wczoraj ‘yesterday’, dzisiaj ‘today’ and jutro‘tomorrow’. Entrance into the reference time system followed entrance into the event time system by about one year, i.e., at about 3 years as contrasted with 2 years of age. Children learning English and Polish produced deictic mismatches between tense and adverbs while learning the meaning of ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’, and they made errors in the co-ordination of tenses in complex sentences. The error patterns that accompany the entrance into the reference time system demonstrate the importance of combining a theory of sentence processing with a theory of clause structure.
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